Up-Skilling HR Is The First Domino To Performance Gains

The Human Resources department, whether they realize it or not, stands at the pivot to future organizational performance. While there is a limelight on the roles of the IT and Marketing as technological drivers of performance, I see this as an incidental overlap into a function that is, at it’s core, capabilities driven by HR. As other analysts like Dion Hinchcliffe of Adjuvi and Ray Wang of Constellation Research describe, there is a growing cross-functional CxO role that overlaps many of these area. Yet, the ideas of building a culture of employee collaboration and management cooperation stem from HR. If you want to find the right tipping point for a domino chain of performance, start with helping your HR people develop themselves.

Many of the thought leaders I run into—Jon Husband, Steve Denning, John Hagel, Don Tapscott, Gary Hamel, Jeremiah Owyang, Yves Morieux, in addition to Mr. Hinchcliffe, Mr. Wang and others--agree that we need new practices for organizational design, business models, emergent leadership, internal and external engagement, and involving stakeholders in decisions and priorities beyond shareholders alone. These are all squarely topics of concern for HR, but where are they? How can the Chief HR Officers evolve their group to be real drivers of this new space?

The reality however is that HR departments are generally not ready. In part, there are too many changes to keep up with, driven by technological progress, and the aftermath of the recent Global Recession. I would instead focus on the real culprit behind HR’s limitations today: the relevancy of skills of HR professionals.

After a number of conversations on my recent trip at HR Tech Europe 2014, I took a look back at the trends and implications affecting organizations from the human resources department’s viewpoint. I examined three different sources of current trends:

They all generally agree on the top trends or priorities, in the following order:

Leadership, Talent development & pipeline

Talent Retention & Employee engagement

Re- or Up-skilling HR

Talent Sourcing & Recruiting

Analytics

While I see that my point of Updating the skills of HR lies in the middle of the priorities, I still consider it the first domino for good reasons. The viewpoints of how to develop leaders and talent, how to engage employees and improve productivity, how to recruit employees, how employees collaborate, and the analytics we need today are all changing. This isn’t something in Europe alone. The Deloitte study placed Reskilling HR as “highly urgent” globally, with most organizations declaring themselves as “not ready”.

David Wilson of UK analyst & advisory firm elearnity explained in their recent study: 65% of HR leaders in Europe believe future HR success is dependent on Up-skilling HR Teams. From another HR Tech Europe session, Mark Martin of UK-based HR consultancy Foundation Stones, and Sander Nieuwenhuizen, VP of HR from oil & gas giant, Shell, both agreed that people in HR need to learn how technology is reshaping their core functions. This is about becoming skilled as IT professionals, administrators or developers, but knowing how the technology when applied correctly redesigns how we manage and collaborate, and the tech skills people are learning to do so.

The fundamental changes to how we manage and motivate people all hinge on what HR considers and advises as the relevant and appropriate models to use. Is it a surprise that employees consider the irrelevancy of policies and ops of HR department as an obstacle to getting things done?

There is a great deal for to catch up on that lies beyond what is considered traditional HR technology (employee records management, benefits tracking and planning, compensation planning, recruiting, learning & talent development). These do not disappear. Rather, what has changed is how they are manifested.

Employee records can now be integrated with intranet collaboration services and directories, to help employees find and connect to accelerate and reduce line-manager burden to ensure cross-silo cooperation. Talent development can be based on real-time data of expertise that employees develop over their lifetime validated in their collaborating on projects together. Learning can utilize the dynamics of social proof of what employees in different roles consider vital to what they do, rather than a pre-selected listed by an administrative body without in-the-field experience. Even compensation planning is transformed when you can see the degree of cooperation and contribution by individuals as assessed by those they work with. More aspects of company culture become clear as people communicate and interact through this technology. The new approaches of emergent and informal leadership are manifesting through this ability to communicate and influence the views and goals of others. Finally, recruiting is the one aspect that has almost entirely transformed to include hiring practices through social job sites, peer referrals, and locating and drawing talent through popular social sites.

All roles in HR need to at least know how these aspects manifest. It is not a “specialty” to know these reframed basics of the role. A few, working along with IT, need to go the next level to know how to implement and manage such systems. And lastly, you need at least a few data scientists who are skilled in working with these new technologies, and understand how and what to measure in social interaction.

Up-skilling HR then makes the other issues easier to comprehend. Raising new leaders from inside the organization becomes easier to do when you can tell who has the capabilities to influence and lead others in productive activities. Developing talent becomes easier when you have more cross-employee engagement, and informal mentoring becomes a natural aspect of peer interaction. Sourcing can become more realistic when you have better data about actual skills in use by the employee base, not just what certifications they have completed.

The pivot therefore to getting better understanding of performance in the organization is to improve the skills of the HR department, what they understand of technology in use, and how they measure the systems. We need new yardsticks of measurement, but first we need people who even understand them and their implications.

I have been an active explorer and advisor of collaboration and culture in online communities, a journalist, a gamer, a content marketer and a strategist. I am a senior manager of Learning Architecture & Innovation at Adobe Systems. I am also part of the future of work f...